Game Summary

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based strategy/role-playing game based on the award winning Call of Cthulhu RPG. Developed in conjunction with Chaosium and based their multi-award winning Call of Cthulhu RPG. Set in the midst of World War One, the game pits your team of investigators and soldiers against an ancient enemy, one older than humanity itself... Can your team of investigators keep their grip on sanity long enough to stop these diabolical plans? The fate of humanity is in your hands...

Call of Cthulhu was originally the title of a novella by cult American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) which has, since it was published in 1928, captured the imagination of generation after generation of fans. Returning to the horror from Lovecraft's original 'Reanimator' set during the dark days of WW1, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land draws the player into a nightmare world where the terror of mustard gas and trench warfare are but a foretaste of what is to follow.

Key Features

Full 3D graphics with high quality textures, images and effects to bring the action alive.

Select from a range of authentic period weapons, equipment, armour, skills and more. - Build your team up to match your gaming style; will you shred your foes with massed rifle fire or blast them with powerful spells gleaned from forbidden tomes? It's your choice!

User Reviews

Thud

ritish soldiers, adventurers, and mystics against cultists, shambling zombies, and a host of classic Lovecraft Mythos monsters pouring into the Western Front. Weapons, armor, and equipment are all pulled from the time period.
The game plays like a lite version of the X-Com franchise, spending Action Points to move your squad around the map and attack enemies. A basic cover and over-watch mechanic helps keep battles tactically interesting. Other elements are heavily simplified in the name of accessibility. There’s no ammo or weapon maintenance to keep track if. Characters are unable to go prone and you can safely blast away with shotguns and machine guns from the back of your formation without worrying about friendly fire.
The Wasted Land is also a short game. The campaign features less than a dozen missions, including a few very short dream sequences. Most missions have you advancing slowly through small maps, beating down waves of enemies that spawn in from all directions. Poison gas, time limits, underground areas (where artillery doesn’t work), and the occasional defensive stand provide much needed variety. The timed missions are arguably the best, forcing you to keep moving forwards and not pick your enemies apart from a distance.
Later levels start to feature a lot of rushes by bullet sponge melee bruisers. With elephant guns, point-blank shotgun blasts, and artillery strikes in the mix the game needs them just to give you something to focus fire on. Against the background of WW1 it’s hard to argue against humans being brutally effective killers able to match even lesser Mythos creatures. In “The Wasted Land” Lovecraft’s monsters are vulnerable to guns if the guns are big enough.
While ripping apart the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath with massed machine-gun fire isn’t quite in the spirit of the source material The Wasted Land does show that confronting Mythos creatures takes a mental toll. Attacking or being attacked by monsters drains sanity. Spells, while powerful, also cost the caster a hefty number of sanity points. Insane characters can freeze up in terror (which is bad) or go berserk and gain a massive speed and attack rate increase for a few turns.
Dealing with sanity becomes an interesting tactical consideration. When his sanity drains away a berserk machine-gunner can mow down an entire pack of lumbering lobster-mutants. He can just as easily freeze up and be devoured. Insanity eventually disables a character but the short term boost it provided turned the tide of more than one desperate encounter.
A character with the appropriate skill and a psychology book can restore lost sanity points, which I like to imagine involves simply smacking the patient with the book while shouting “Snap out of it!” In later missions a designated combat psychologist becomes as much a necessity as a medic, if not more so. A few rounds of holding off skittering gribblies is all it takes to reduce a character’s brain to mush without Psychiatric support.
Between missions you can buy new equipment and spend accumulated XP to upgrade stats and skills. Oddly enough all XP is dumped into a common pool where it can be spent on any character. This means it’s pretty easy to max out someone’s primary weapon skill early in the campaign, playing havoc with the difficulty curve. I’m not sure why XP isn’t evenly split between your squad but doing so would have helped pace character progression.
I played The Wasted Land on PC but the game was originally made for the iOS. It shows in the form of an uneven port. The Character and Inventory screens would sometimes be go completely black, requiring a game restart to fix. The sound-track also tended to cut in and out at random. These bugs were annoying but not game breaking.
I had fun playing The Wasted Land, and I appreciate developers Red Wasp making a PC port. It stacks up better in its native mobile environment than in competition with similar PC games like X-Com though. Additional content beyond the single short campaign would have also added a lot of value.

Zorder

port was not that good. If you looked at the user interface, even if you had no idea that it was originaly a mobile game, you'd probably start to realize that it was originaly a mobile game. The user interface is clearly designed for mobile devices and feels someone strange on PC. The gameplay is nice along with the Lovecraftian setting and the. Being a mobile game the graphics are not that impressive. Still, it's a very satisfying and fun game to play if you're into turn based games specially with the Lovecraftian setting. Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land might not be a game for every fan of turn based combat but it's certainly a good game, probably not the best PC port but still a good game, someone people might prefer to play it on mobile devices though. Still, at $4.99 you can't go wrong with this one.

kal3jdoskop

hing, I could tell about it. The interface unintuitive and the graphic shows quite good, that it is the simple conversion from Android.
But even with this things - I've really enjoyed this game. The campaign is quite nice constructed. The tactical aspects are suprisingly good and polished (you need to think, how you can survive against the hordes of well-armed German Soldiers/Myth Monsters with a couple of heroes). And the equipment is very characteristic, and even the number of weapons is satisfactory. If you're the fan of H.P. Lovecraft, you can add one point to my note. And it is the game mainly for HPL fans, because "normal players"... Well, they won't be disappointed, but they won't be fascinated too. Pity, that there is no multiplayer option - it could be really interesting experience, to fight against living oponnent with myth-monsters on your side.